Sun Tzu said: One uses the cheng to engage, the ch’i to gain victory.
The duality of cheng and ch’i illuminates great power competition, in antiquity and the present day. These concepts have often been mistranslated as opposites: “orthodox” and “unorthodox,” but a complementary interpretation is more profitable. Sun Tzu found both necessary for success. In the contemporary context, cheng embodies incremental improvement. Ch’i exemplifies new, unexpected lines of effort: strategic and technological innovation.
Cheng is “overt…direct, visible.” This is the “obvious action [that] fixes the enemy,” that “pins him down.” Cheng today defines conventional military power as it is presently understood, including advanced warships, aircraft carriers, and high-end manned aircraft. Retired General Stanley McChrystal epitomized cheng’s U.S. context in his book Team of Teams, describing a stagnant operational paradigm: “We tried to do what we had always done, only better.”
Ch’i is the “extraordinary action . . . the bid for a decision.” It expands the envelope of power. A modern understanding of ch’i includes novel weapons such as antiship ballistic missiles, but it is not limited to a kinetic focus on an opposing center of gravity. Ch’i implies other means. These include the range of actions native to hybrid war: cyber operations, lawfare, and information warfare. Embodied in current events, ch’i appears in China’s Maritime Militia actions around disputed islands, or economic capture of strategic ports.
Ch’i echoes in dictums such as the Chinese Unrestricted Warfare’s “War will be conducted in nonwar spheres,” or George Kennan’s “Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace . . . the employment of all the means at a nation’s command . . . to achieve its national objectives.” Nathan Freier amplifies:
The purely military aspects of hybrid, high-end challenges, e.g., a hostile state’s armed forces, may be peripheral to the actual conflict or competition. . . . the real ‘war’ occurs in other domains—politics, economics, social action, etc.
The “purely military” is the cheng. The “real war” is the ch’i—a shift in the competitive paradigm.
Dreadnoughts: From Jutland to Pearl Harbor
In the 1900s era of pre-World War great power competition, Great Britain faced a familiar challenge. Risks multiplied in an ambiguous environment where commitments to strategic ends surpassed budgetary means. The technologies of warfare were rapidly changing. The Royal Navy chose cheng: A plan to replace dispersed forces with a smaller fleet of more lethal ships. These new battleships became known as the dreadnoughts. They boasted the latest naval technologies of the time: steam turbine power plants and “all-big-gun” armaments of heavy artillery. Naval powers worldwide quickly copied this concept.
By 1916, dreadnought-type battleships were common to both the British and German fleets. They clashed indecisively at Jutland. Billy Mitchell’s 1921 demonstration of effective aircraft employment against warships made carrier aviation a contemporary ch’i. But, as late as the 1930s, U.S. naval planners still credited the primacy of the big-gun battleship. Milan Vego wrote: “The U.S. Navy’s tactical doctrine envisaged . . . carrier-based aircraft would be used as gun spotters for the battle line that would engage the Japanese battle fleet.”1 The U.S. “battle line” entered World War II at anchor in Pearl Harbor.
British and German dreadnoughts fought to a draw. The United States and Japan destroyed each other’s battleships with airpower. Today, defense establishments iterate on concepts from the Mitchell era, while the “gun-spotting” duties of reconnaissance and targeting are assigned to unmanned aircraft and space systems. This is an uncanny parallel to the 1930s imagination of carrier aviation. The ch’i of that age has become a modern-day cheng.
Exquisite Platforms and Integrated Deterrence
Navies tilt at dreadnoughts: singular platforms concentrating technological lethality. Today, nations seek aircraft carriers and modern manned fighters, just as battleships proliferated in the 1900s. But dreadnoughts have downsides. The costs of “exquisite platforms” grow to exceed the utility of their employment. Admiralties may hesitate to risk such expensive ships. The competitor’s incentive lies not with matching capability but innovating a way around it. Hybrid warfare is a product of this paradigm: Eliding the U.S. advantage in concentrated battle by distributing conflict across greater dimensions of time and space.
When budgetary programming replaces strategic thinking, cheng is well-funded. Increasing allocations chase decreasing margins of improvement. Cheng will be part of the toolkit, but there are hints of a burgeoning paradigm shift. The United States’ 2020 tri-service maritime strategy, Advantage at Sea, calls for “capabilities that apply across the competition continuum,” and “fewer exquisite platforms.” Both George Kennan and Unrestricted Warfare echo in Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s recent discussion of “integrated deterrence . . . a foreign policy that employs all instruments of our national power,” and his hypothetical example of a cyber response to an incident at sea.
Unmanned aircraft, space systems, and cyber warfare will complement and overtake incremental improvements to exquisite platforms. Adaptability, flexibility, and comfort with ambiguity will be key enablers. Examples include the planned Constellation-class of frigates, an optionally piloted replacement for naval rotary-wing aircraft, and perhaps the struggling littoral combat ships. SpaceX’s Starlink project demonstrates distributed communications without relying on exquisite targets in geosynchronous orbit. As software and its ease of upgrade become tactical determinants, any of these adaptable platforms may host technologies of algorithmic battle.
George Kennan said: “We have been handicapped . . . by a tendency to view war as a sort of sporting contest outside of all political context.” Capability must complement policy, synchronizing the levers of national power to compete in a changing landscape. Synergies of ch’i and cheng are achieved through adaptable innovation, rather than investments in technological monoliths. Consider the fate of the dreadnoughts: The “gun spotting” platforms of today may shift the paradigm of seapower tomorrow.
Endnotes
- Milan Vego, Operational Warfare at Sea: Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2009), 9.
